Her instinct was to run, but she suppressed it. She stood there, breathing heavily, looking at the gaping black hole that led to the corridor and freedom. The snoring seemed much louder now, and it was coming from the left, the direction she’d have to go to get to the front door.
She crept down the corridor, wincing with each creak of floorboard. The snoring persisted, deep, steady, and getting louder. She eased her head around the corner and looked into the room it was coming from.
There were three windows along one wall, all hung with heavy curtains, but the curtains were pulled back. In the glow of dim starlight, she could see equipment strewn around the floor, the kind of stuff she’d once seen in a photographer’s studio: tripods, small lights with little flaps mounted on the front, big lights that looked like scoops. In the center of the clutter was a single piece of furniture: a king-sized bed. The snoring man was stretched out on top of it, fully clothed, lying on his back with one arm across his eyes. His mouth was open.
Marta continued creeping toward the front door. She took a cautious step and listened, another cautious step and listened, forcing herself not to hurry.
The key was dangling from the lock. She turned it, stepped out into the night, and gently closed the door behind her.
Only then did she break into a run.
Chapter Twenty
The world’s largest freshwater archipelago, the Anavilhanas, begins some seventy kilometers upstream from Manaus. At that point, the Rio Negro is almost twenty kilometers wide.
During the rainy season, about two hundred of the islands lie submerged, but the vegetation covering them continues to protrude above the surface of the water. Clinging to the tops of the trees, seeking refuge from the flood, are monkeys half the size of a man and snakes as thick as telephone poles.
But it wasn’t the rainy season. Beaches had appeared. Channels had opened between the islands. The snakes and monkeys were crawling around at ground level.
The low water demanded careful navigation and made the search for The Goat’s boat all the more difficult. It took Claudia and her companions all morning and the better part of the afternoon to locate Osvaldo and his cargo.
Osvaldo had chosen his hiding place well, anchoring in a little cove, largely concealed behind a neighboring island. The boat was surrounded on three sides by dense rain forest.
Osvaldo wasn’t pleased to see them arrive, but he was downright delighted when The Goat told him they weren’t going to stay.
The Goat had him row the girls ashore and line them up on the beach. He addressed them as a group, holding a piece of rubber hose, slapping it against his thigh for emphasis.
“I know for a fact,” he said, “that somebody was in the house asking about Marta.” Slap. “I also know, for a fact, that someone shot off her mouth and said we were keeping her.” Slap.
Silence.
“I want to know who it was.” Slap.
The girls started looking at each other.
“If whoever it was tells me all about it,” Slap “nobody’s gonna get hurt. But if she doesn’t step forward right now,” Slap “and I mean right now,” Slap Slap “all of you are in for the beating of your lives.”
Now they were looking at one girl in particular, Vileini Rabelo, the girl who called herself Topaz.
Vileini put her hands over her face and started to cry.
“It’s that priest,” The Goat said when they were on their way back to Manaus. “He’s behind all this. Got to be him.”
“What priest?” Claudia said.
“Vitorio Barone. He runs a school for slum kids in Sao Lazaro. When he’s not in the school, or sleeping, Barone is shooting his mouth off. He’s got a thing about young girls.”
“He likes to fuck young girls?” Hans asked.
“Hell, no,” The Goat said. “Just the opposite. Barone doesn’t want anybody to fuck them.”
“Fucking Nazi. What’s it to him?”
“He’s tried bitching to Chief Pinto, the mayor, and the governor. They all blew him off. Now, he musta gotten into bed with the federals.”
“How do you figure?” Claudia said.
“This Lauro kid, what did Topaz say his last name was?”
“Tadesco.”
“Tadesco. Yeah, that’s it. Lauro Tadesco. He’s too young to be a cop himself, right?”
“Right.”
“And he’s a local. He has the accent, knows the town. Topaz said so. How could they recruit him? Tell me that. They couldn’t start asking around for someone to take a risk like that without Chief Pinto hearing all about it. But Barone, the priest, he’d know a kid like that.”
“Hmmm,” Claudia said.
“Something else too,” The Goat said. “Lauro didn’t want to fuck, he only wanted to talk. He coulda done both, fucked and talked, but he only talked. And he let Topaz wrap him around her little finger. If that doesn’t smell like priest, I don’t know what does.”
Claudia recalled Topaz’s tearful confession.
The kid had asked Topaz if that was her real name. She’d told him it was. Then she’d asked him for his.
“Lauro,” he’d said.
He wasn’t bad-looking, she’d said, so she played the coquette, fished for a return visit, said she didn’t believe his name was really Lauro, said that a lot of guys lied to the girls they met in boates.
And just like that, the kid pulled out his identity card.
Lauro Tadesco.
Topaz even remembered his last name, probably due to some kind of fantasy on her part, a fantasy of getting out of the life, seeing herself as Senhora Tadesco, set up in a house of her own with a couple of kids. Well, that was behind her now. She wouldn’t be talking to Lauro Tadesco anymore.
The Goat shook his head at the gullibility of both of them; Lauro’s even more than Topaz’s.
“Who the hell needs to impress a whore? Who even cares what a whore thinks? This Lauro, he must be some kind of religious freak.”
Claudia mulled it over. If Lauro was feeding information to Silva, there might be a way to use him to bait a trap. She thought about discussing her emerging plan with The Goat, then rejected the idea. He wasn’t as threatened as she was, and he wouldn’t be as likely to consider extreme measures.
Marta Malan had been talking for almost an hour, first to the couple who’d picked her up, now to the fat guy who wanted her to tell the whole story all over again. Everything she’d said was true, but she’d left a few things out. For one thing, she didn’t feel obligated to explain the true nature of her relationship with Andrea. That was nobody’s business but their own. She said that Andrea had been sold off because she was too old, but didn’t mention that it was also because she was no longer a virgin. She did mention her grandfather. That had impressed the first two, and it seemed to impress the man who was interrogating her now. His eyebrows had gone up when she said it.
She took another sip of her third cafe com leite. He didn’t press her, just sat there, silently, waiting for her to go on.
“I turned left on the main road,” she said. “There wasn’t much traffic at that time of the morning. The first set of headlights I saw, I panicked. They were coming from behind me, and I thought it might be that brute I’d left back at the house. I crawled into the brush to hide.”
She looked down at the old-fashioned cassette recorder he was using to take her statement, felt her eyelids drooping. Now that the danger was over, adrenaline was no longer keeping her awake. Any moment now, she was liable to fall asleep right there at the table. Her throat was dry from talking. She took another sip of coffee and continued. “When daylight came, I went to look for a stretch of road where I could see the cars coming from a long way off. As soon as I was sure it wasn’t that woman, or her capangas, or The Goat, or his girlfriend, I’d step out and try to flag them down. Nobody stopped. They must have thought I was a thief, or a prostitute, or something. I got so sick of it that when I saw that couple coming, I went out and stood in the center of the road. They had to either stop or drive over me. They stopped. And they brought me here.”